Gopher Protocol - Computer Definition

A distributed document search-and-find network protocol
was released in 1991 by Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill. Nobody really knows why
the protocol was named “gopher.” Some individuals say it means simply “go-fer”
information, whereas others note that it does its job using a web of menu items
similar to gopher holes. Still others maintain that it was named after the
mascot for the University of Minnesota (the Golden Gophers), which is where
Lindner and McCahill went to university.

The Gopher’s original design for sharing documents was
similar to that of the World Wide Web,
and the Gopher protocol has been replaced by the Web. Because the Gopher
protocol had some features not supported by the Web, some experts consider it
to have had a better protocol for searching and storing large data
repositories.

When the Web was first introduced in 1991, Gopher was
popular. Then, in February 1993 when the University of Minnesota announced that
it would begin to charge users licensing fees to use Gopher, the latter
underwent a large decrease in both popularity and usage. Some security experts
believe that Gopher’s downfall was brought on by its limited structure as
compared to free-form HTML.